Sunflower under conventional and organic farming systems: results from a long term experiment in Central Italy

Sunflower productivity under organic and conventional agricultural systems was studied between 2002 and 2004 in the frame of the MASCOT experiment (Mediterranean Arable Systems COmparison Trial), established in 2001. The aim was to compare organic and conventional management systems for a typical arable crop rotation of Central Italy in the long-term. Sunflower was cultivated as a part of a five-year stockless arable crop rotation (sugar beet-common wheatsunflower-pigeon bean-durum wheat). In the organic system, red clover (Trifolium pratense) is interseeded in common and durum wheat and used as a green manure for sunflower or sugar beet. Grain yield of organically-grown sunflower was lower by 41%, 17% and 44% in 2002, 2003 and 2004 respectively, but no significant differences in percent seed oil content were found between the conventional and organic sunflower in two years out of three

Effect of Cover Crops on Nitrogen Uptake, Soil Water Content and Biomass Production in a Short Rotation Poplar Plantation

The agricultural production of biomass for energy-giving uses is attracting increasing interest particularly in relation to the possibility of reducing the use of fossil fuels and thereby limiting the emission of greenhouse gases. However one of the barriers to wider development of biomass energy sources is the lack of information about the environmental impacts on the landscape of increasing production of biomass crops. In the first growth phases as in the subsequent harvesting stages, the risks of erosion can become considerable due to the absence of any sort of protective canopy. In this case resorting to the use of cover crops can represent a useful agronomic measure since it provides and maintains a suitable ground covering, above all in the winter months when leaf fall exposes the soil to rain action. The aim of the present work was to evaluate some of the agronomic effects of the planting of two different species of cover crops, the legume Trifolium subterraneum L. and the grass Lolium perenne L. in a closely spaced forestry plantation

Towards an SDN network control application for differentiated traffic routing

In the last years, Software Defined Networking has emerged as a promising paradigm to foster network innovation and address the issues coming from the ossification of the TCP/IP architecture. The clean separation between control and data plane, the definition of northbound and southbound interfaces are key features of the Software Defined Networking paradigm. Moreover, a centralised control plane allows network operators to deploy advanced control and management strategies. Effective traffic engineering and resources management policies allow to achieve a better utilisation of network resources and improve endto- end service performance. This paper deals with the architectural design and experimental validation of a control application that enables differentiated routing for traffic flows belonging to different service classes. The new control application makes routing decisions leveraging on OpenFlow network statistics, i.e., taking advantage of real-time network status information. Moreover, a Deep Packet Inspection module has been developed and integrated in the control application to detect VoIP traffic with Session Initiation Protocol signalling, enforcing this way policies for a differentiated treatment of VoIP traffic. Finally, a functional validation is performed in emulated environment.This work was supported by the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2015.724925

Greenhouse gas emissions from soil cultivated with vegetables in crop rotation under integrated, organic and organic conservation management in a Mediterranean environment

A combination of organic and conservation approaches have not been widely tested, neither considering agronomic implications nor the impacts on the environment. Focussing on the effect of agricultural practices on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from soil, the hypothesis of this research is that the organic conservation system (ORG+) may reduce emissions of N2O, CH4 and CO2 from soil, compared to an integrated farming system (INT) and an organic (ORG) system in a two-year irrigated vegetable crop rotation set up in 2014, in a Mediterranean environment. The crop rotation included: Savoy cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. sabauda L. cv. Famosa), spring lettuce (Lactuca sativa L. cv. Justine), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill. cv. Montebianco) and summer lettuce (L. sativa cv. Ballerina). Fluxes from soil of N2O, CH4 and CO2 were measured from October 2014 to July 2016 with the flow-through non-steady state chamber technique using a mobile instrument equipped with high precision analysers. Both cumulative and daily N2O emissions were mainly lower in ORG+ than in INT and ORG. All the cropping systems acted as a sink of CH4, with no significant differences among treatments. The ORG and ORG+ systems accounted for higher cumulative and daily CO2 emissions than INT, maybe due to the stimulating effect on soil respiration of organic material (fertilizers/plant biomass) supplied in ORG and ORG+. Overall, the integration of conservation and organic agriculture showed a tendency for higher CO2 emissions and lower N2O emissions than the other treatments, without any clear results on its potential for mitigating GHG emissions from soil

Communication and the Pragmatic Condition

Presented March 9, 201